Details about the treatment of Binyam Mohamed, the former Guantanamo detainee,
should be released because it is not “secret intelligence,” the High Court
has ruled.

Mohamed is fighting for the release of information about his treatment at the hands of the Americans in an on-going court battle with the Foreign Office.

The case is separate from another court battle for compensation.

In the latest of their rulings, Lord Justice Thomas and Mr Justice Lloyd Jones said that Mohamed’s treatment “could never properly be described in a democracy as 'a secret' or an 'intelligence secret' or 'a summary of classified intelligence'."

The judges previously redacted passages from a previous judgment after the Foreign Secretary argued that disclosing the information could jeopardise Britain’s intelligence-sharing relationship with the US.

The judges have now ruled that the material should be put back in because it was "essential" to their reasoning and was no threat to national security.

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The judges said the material removed from their fifth judgment last month was already in the public domain but the Foreign Office is taking the issue to the Court of Appeal next month.

Earlier this year President Obama sanctioned the release of memoranda on interrogation techniques on al-Qaeda detainees such as Abu Zubaydah.

The High Court has re-inserted two passages after the Foreign Office dropped its objections. Five more remain contested.

The first said: "One of those memoranda dated August 1 2002, from Mr JS Bybee, Assistant Attorney-General, to Mr John Rizzo, acting General Counsel of the CIA, made clear that the techniques described were those employed against Mr Zubaydah, alleged to be a high-ranking member of al-Qaeda."

The judges said the remainder of the paragraph, which remained redacted from public versions of the judgment, was a verbatim quotation from a memo made public in America in April this year.

The other passage re-inserted stated that disclosure of the paragraphs redacted from the court's original judgment was "consistent with the publication of the CIA interrogation technique memoranda" and did not publicise any information about foreign states.

The judges said in their fifth judgment last month that it was necessary to stand back and ask "whether President Obama would curtail the supply of information to the United States' oldest ally when what was put into the public domain was not intelligence".

What they went on to say, which is still undisclosed, relates to their reasoning that publication of the seven paragraphs withheld from their first judgment "is necessary to uphold the rule of law and democratic accountability".

The judges said: "It is difficult on an objective basis to see any grounds for rejecting the submission of Mr Mohamed, the UK media and the international media that there is no evidence of any real risk of serious harm to the national security of the United Kingdom."

They repeated their finding that "what is contained in those seven redacted paragraphs gives rise to an arguable case of torture or cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment".

A Foreign Office spokesman denied that the information was in the public domain and said: "We have repeatedly made clear that it is not for the UK to release US intelligence.

"The issues at stake go to the heart of the UK's intelligence sharing relationship with other countries and our efforts to defend UK security."

Human rights group Reprieve accused Mr Miliband of using "Alice in Wonderland" argument to suppress the details of the torture of Mr Mohamed and hide embarrassing information from the public, even though those details were in the public domain.